Steve Jobs' Speech at Palo Alto High School

I recently read a new book compiled by the "Steve Jobs Archive" called Make Something Wonderful. It collects many of Jobs' public and private speeches, emails, and photos — some of which, it's said, even longtime Jobs fans had never seen. I'm not a longtime fan; I haven't even read his biography. I picked up this book to practice my English.

My English isn't great, and I haven't read many English books, so it was quite a struggle. But when I came across the speech "Speech at Palo Alto High School," I was deeply moved. There are probably videos of this speech online, and others have surely translated it into Chinese before. But I decided to translate it myself, both to savor its content and to better learn English.

The full ebook of Make Something Wonderful can be downloaded for free from the Steve Jobs Archive, or read through the Books app on iPhone or Mac.

Enough preamble — here's the speech.

Today, on the day you leave high school and, to a large extent, will leave your parents and begin to go on the adventure of your life alone, I have been asked to come here and say a few things to you. I hope to provide you with some wisdom and advice for you to remember in the journey ahead.

All of my remarks will be directed to the students and not the parents. It is proper that I do so since all of my wisdom comes from my age. And your parents share my age and are even wiser, of this I'm sure.

In any case, I'm a little wiser than you, and maybe you'll listen to me when you might not listen to your parents. There may be things that I'll say today that your parents might disagree with, or might completely agree with. I will be the first one to fill your head with ideas that they disagree with after you get out of high school. Wait until you get to college! But, in any case, if anything you hear from me today is inconsistent with what they told you, rest assured, I am right.

Pay attention to those things that are magical, mysterious, and artistic in the world. The goal-oriented, material things, everyone and everything will try to convince you to pursue them, but they are not the most important things in life. Most of you know this instinctively. Think back on this spring — the last three or four months — as you were finishing up high school, knowing where you'll be next year, and really started to have strong intuitions about this world you're about to step into. Maybe you saw yourself in Paris, sculpting in a studio, as the evening sun lit a set of casement windows. Maybe in India, running a hospital for poor children, hearing the bustle of an outdoor market in the early morning. Maybe you saw yourself in a recording studio, cutting your new album. Maybe you saw yourself at four-thirty in the morning, alone in your room, the only person in the world to understand the physics law you just discovered.

Whatever it was, I bet most of you had these kinds of intuitions about what you ought to be doing. These intuitions are very real, and if nurtured, can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitions is to walk alone near sunset — and spend some extra time looking at the sky. We're never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true.

People will give you all sorts of reasons why you can't do these things:

• You can't make a living writing songs. (Well, ask Bob Dylan.)
• Helping kids in India is great, but you have to prepare for real life. (Ask Mother Teresa.)

You can do more with your life. (You can hear Albert Einstein's parents encouraging him to get a real job, when instead of taking a position in a university, he got a menial job in the Swiss patent office, so he could pursue his new ideas at night.)

If you don't have these intuitions, called dreams, you're in trouble. You need to regain them before you're going to spend four years or more heading in a direction that you may or may not want to head, from your heart.

Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don't see.

If you're going to connect experiences and insights, you have to have them first. What makes creative people feel guilty is that they are simply conveying what they "see." How to get a broader range of experiences? Not just walk down the same path that others have walked.

Let me give you an example. The college I went to was a very small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, called Reed College. At the time, it was the center of the calligraphy renaissance movement in the U.S. Before I dropped out, I completed a calligraphy course, and at eighteen, I was exposed to a whole new world of typography, graphic layout, and font design. There was no hope of earning any income from these skills and knowledge, and some of my friends ridiculed me for wasting my time and talent learning fancy lettering.

However, years later, when we were designing the Mac, it was essentially the same experiences and insights that compelled me to insist that we find a way to use proper spacing and offer a range of fonts, bringing a richer world of typography to computing than had ever existed before. This also gave birth to the LaserWriter printer, which could print these typefaces at the quality they deserved. And it laid the foundation for "desktop publishing." I sincerely tell you: if I had given up that calligraphy course for more "practical" courses, like economics or engineering, none of this would have happened at Apple.

So, to be a creative person, you need to "feed" and "invest" in yourself by exploring unknown paths beyond your past experiences and fields. Find new dimensions of yourself — especially those with a romantic air.

But there's no way to know in advance where any particular path will lead, and in some ways, that's the beauty of it. The only thing you can do is believe that what you follow with your heart will indeed come back to make your life much richer. And it can. Then you'll gain an even more unshakeable confidence in your instincts and intuitions.

Don't be a "career" person. The biggest enemy of most dreams and intuitions — and one of the most dangerous, suffocating concepts ever invented by humans — is the "career." A career is the concept of prescribing how a person should progress through stages of training and practice in work.

There's a big problem with this. First, the notion that your work and life are different, are separate. If you are passionate about your life and your work, they cannot be completely separated — they will more or less become one thing. And this is a better way for a person to live.

When you encounter the real world, the risk factors of a career decrease. Many people believe they've found a safe harbor (say, as a lawyer or accountant), only to wake up ten or fifteen years later and realize the price they've paid.

Make your avocation your vocation. Make your hobby your work.

The journey is the reward. When you get to the end of the rainbow and find a pot of gold, people say you're a success. But they're wrong. The real reward is in crossing the rainbow. I say this easily — I got a pot of gold (literally). But if you get it, you'll already know this isn't the reward you wanted, and you'll go looking for another rainbow to cross.

Think of your life as a rainbow arching across the horizon. You appear, you have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.

The two endpoints of everyone's rainbow are birth and death. We all experience these two things completely alone. Yet most people your age have never thought much about these things, let alone witnessed them in others. How many of you have witnessed another person being born? It's a miracle. How many have witnessed a person dying? It's a mystery beyond our comprehension. No living person knows what truly happens at or after death. Some people believe this, some believe that, but nobody really knows. Again, most people your age have never thought much about these things — as if we're protecting you from them, worried that the notion of mortality will somehow harm you. For me, it's the opposite: knowing that my rainbow bridge will eventually descend makes me want to burn even brighter while I'm in the sky. Not for others, but for myself — for knowing the footprints I'm leaving behind.

Now, as you pass through this arc across the sky, you want to have as few regrets as possible. Remember, regrets are not the same as mistakes. Mistakes are things you did and wish you could do over. Maybe you were foolish (usually involving women), or maybe you were afraid, or maybe you hurt someone. Some mistakes are serious, some are not. But if your intentions were pure, they almost always enriched your life in some way. So mistakes are things you did and wish you could do over.

Regrets are usually things you didn't do and wish you had. I still regret not kissing Nancy Kinniman in high school. Who knows what might have happened? Maybe she has regrets too...

Above is my translation of the speech "Speech at Palo Alto High School" from the book.

The translation process was aided by dictionaries, Apple Translate, and ChatGPT. While machine translation is now quite accurate and perfectly usable, I still hope we can appreciate the traditional craft of human translation — Humans help humans!

I also learned some interesting things during the process. For example, both "Career" and "Vocation" translate to the same word in Chinese. "Career" conveys a planned, development-focused profession, while "Vocation" leans more toward interests, personal values — a calling of the soul. The dangerous concept Jobs describes is "Career," and he advocates turning your "Avocation" (hobby) into your "Vocation." Since Chinese doesn't have a neat equivalent, I translated "Make your avocation your vocation" as "Let your interests become your mission."

I hope we all find a Vocation, not just a Career~

If you've read this far, either you're a die-hard Jobs fan or you're being too kind to me. Either way, thanks for reading, and good luck~